Over the last few years I have written the story of our adventures as a family, and our children in a blog. I’ve shared countless stories, observations and insights because the story has remained our own. Events this week have challenged the future of me writing about anybody but myself, and I’m now not sure what the future might hold in terms of “telling the wider story”.
Cutting a long story short, our eldest daughter is being targetted at school by another child, and it’s effecting her massively. In the autumn her year group will be leaving primary school, and moving on to secondary education, and we suspect this change is at the heart of it all.
Some of the year group will be going to a school across town with an entrance exam, some will be be spirited off to various other schools out of town, and the rest will go to the state school just down the road.
As the children are divided, circles of friends are going to be broken up. Some children will have to find their place among circles they have never mixed with before. Wesuspect that’s exactly what’s going on with our daughter - a child who is about to lose many of their friends is busy acting the cuckoo, and has landed right in the middle of her circle of friends - manipulating, twisting, and turning them against each other.
It’s such a shame - and yet in many ways is unavoidable due to the kind of area we live in. A significant proportion of the families here are wealthy - the elitism, social sharpness, and choosing of friends based on their benefit to you kind of comes with territory.
In some ways I’m sad because the children are being exposed to it - almost being forced to grow up at last - but also happy because we managed to shield our daughter from that world for so long. We somehow managed to hold on to the happy-go-lucky kid that plays football for the town on Saturdays, laughs uproariously at berps, climbs trees, reads books, and does a hundred other things. We somehow managed to avoid a kid that cares what labels are on her clothes, what kind of car we drive, or what street we live in.
Anyway. I mentioned a dilemma in the title.
If I carry on telling the story of our life in a public forum, the tightrope I already walk is going to become even thinner. These stories about growing up, and social circles, and values, and aspirations are stories about real people who might read this and take exception to it.
Is it really worth the effort required to dilute every story - to abstract every happening to the generic, rather than share “my” views and opinions?
A part of this of course is where the story of the children becomes their own, and I stop telling it. I’m not sure we are there yet with our eldest, but these first struggles are probably a harbinger of it’s arrival.